Along came Plurk which is, well, I dunno… completely ignorable. Oh, and there is FriendFeed which Dave Slusher dumped Twitter for, but that just feels like too much too often to me. Too many updates, and updates from friends of friends? Argh…

Right now Twitter still has an advantage, but I feel like it’s slipping away with every feature that gets disabled, and every whale they serve up. identi.ca is interesting to me because it can be decentralized, and because it’s open source. But is it too late? I don’t think so. I mean, Blogger was the deal years ago, and they kept having their own fail, and nowadays look at WordPress. It ain’t over til it’s over.

I think identi.ca has to do a few things to step up as a Twitter replacement.

• Twitter compatible API - We need clients to make identi.ca as easy as Twitter to use
• Friend importer - We need an easy way to migrate from another service
• Continued development - Right now Laconica is open source, that’s all good, but interested from developers and widespread adoption of a community will be key

I’m now using Ping.fm to post to both Twitter and identi.ca. This is a bit of a pain, but it works. Sort of. I opted not to post from Ping.fm to every damn service I belong to, as I find it annoying to read the same thing from my friends on 6 different networks. (And yeah, some sort of de-dupe filtering sort of thing is needed here.)

Anyway, I have hopes for identi.ca as a replacement for Twitter, or at least as a “private label” Twitter since the source it out there for you to use as you like. Go forth developers, and make something awesome!

(You can follow me on identi.ca, I am raster)

The June meeting was at MSOE due to the water damage sustained at Bucketworks. For those of you who have not been to Bucketworks since the incident, you’ll get to see the damage, and hopefully that won’t distract us too much from the Web414 meeting.

We’ll start some of the planning for BarCampMilwaukee3 which is set for the first weekend of October. Hopefully by then Bucketworks will be fully operational. While we will discuss BarCampMilwaukee3, the real planning will start to happen at dedicated meetings yet to be scheduled. As always, anyone interested in helping out is welcome to participate. We’re open like that.

Oh, we have one more thing in store for the Web414 meeting. Teecycle is this neat idea involving selling used shirts online. Here’s how they describe it:

Cool pre-loved vintage T-shirts for cheap. It’s like adopting a cute rescue puppy from an animal shelter, except a Teecycle shirt won’t ruin your furniture, terrorize your cat and crap all over your carpet.

Your purchase also supports the River Revitalization Foundation. $1 of each sale is donated to restore urban river trails and waterways in the Milwaukee area.

I think it’s cool that they are using the web to do this. Tim from Teecycle has asked if anyone from Web414 wants to help him out and model some shirts. If you are interested, stick around after the meeting and get your photo taken. Also, if you have any old shirts you want to donate to Teecycle, bring them to the meeting.

I look forward to seeing you there.

Our first thought was, get a DVD player and connect it to the TV (behind the wall as the TV will be mounted flat or recessed to the wall) and we would then author DVDs and play as needed. This could work, but we’re then looking at the DVDs being standard definition versus high definition. So while this option is cheap, and somewhat easy, the quality would be low. (And burning HD or Blu-ray DVDs is not something we are currently doing.)

We also thought about connecting an old G4 to the TV. We currently have a G3 connected to an LCD monitor doing the photo slide show thing, and connecting a G4 might work, but we need to deal with actually connecting it to a TV, which would probably have HDMI but not VGA, and VGA would probably look like crap.

So, I’m starting to think an AppleTV, at $229 is the best option. It’s pretty much built to do what we want. We could manage the content through iTunes and the AppleTV interface, and make playlists that could loop, and… am I missing anything?

Finally I dug up this Camcorder HQ post by Doug Van Doren

Actually, there’s one HUGE caveat with that: the new Canon ZR’s 800-850 will NOT work with a Mac that has another FireWire device plugged into it. If you have an external hard drive, your iPod or anything plugged into one of the other FireWire ports on the computer and then you plug in a Canon ZR800 series camcorder and launch iMovie or FCP or FCE, it will crash and freeze the Mac OS.

This is a huge bug I recently discovered when I bought a new Canon ZR-800 and ended up crashing all three of my Macs (I tried it on them all just to make sure).

It was a nightmare. Here’s the technical article from Apple:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=61603

It does not mention the ZR800’s specifically, but trust me, it applies to them as well.

If there’s nothing else plugged into the other FireWire ports, it works fine. The only trouble with that is that most people like to use an external firewire drive to put their digitized footage on. This is a big problem if that’s what you’re trying to do.

Luckily I did not experience any real crashes, just the fact that iMovie and Final Cut sort of ’stuck’ while the camera was turned on, and then resumed when turned off. The System Profiler also failed to show any Firewire device when the camera was on. Everything is fine when no other Firewire devices are connected, so there is a workaround… Still, it’s an annoying bug I hope can be fixed in the future.

During the storm, things got a little crazy (see Flickr) and there is water everywhere. It ain’t pretty. If at all possible, can you put a drop in the bucket? If you’ve ever attended a Web414 or a MilwaukeeDevHouse, it would be cool if you could chip in a few bucks to help our little clubhouse make it through this disaster. Bucketworks has been a gracious host to us, and it’s a time of need for them, so put a drop in the bucket and let’s hope it adds up enough to get everything back to normal.

Right now Bucketworks is closed. Until the damage is assessed, they can’t open again. What does that mean for the June 2008 Web414 Meeting? We’re not sure yet… we may have to move it, as well as other events scheduled there in the near future. Like I said, there’s a lot of water…

Jenn has a post on bucketworks.org that tells more, so please go there and see what is up…

And seriously, go pitch in some money! So far it’s just Gabe and I that have done so, and that’s pretty sad. I know there are others out there who can help, even if it’s just $5 or $10.

(Update: Wow! The total is going up! Thanks people, let’s keep it going…)

This is a video I made for the song Empty Pockets, which I recorded back in February 2008 for the RPM Challenge.

(Originally uploaded to blip.tv)

Rick originally asked me about some twitter coding a while back, and I mentioned what I had done with twitter for BarCampMilwaukee2, but then I got busy and nothing happened. Finally he bugged me again and pointed me to Anatomy of a Twitter Bot by Whitney McNamara and since I’m a Perl nerd, I was in…

Sadly, it took me way too long to go through the code and change what I wanted, and when I finally did, and had it all running on my home server, I tried to move it to a GoDaddy account which was total fail for so many reasons. GoDaddy’s cheap accounts are ok for simple web sites, but not for running more complex code.

So I ended up putting on my server, where it sits for now. It’s a Perl/MySQL application, which runs via cron every X minutes. There’s a table to allow you to add more accounts so it can run multiple twitterbots (so far we’ve got mkefood, nycfood, and winetweets.) I’m not 100% sure how it will scale, and I’ve found one bug already where it dies if an account has no replies (which is fixable by sending a reply to an account, but it should be fixed in the code as well.)

Next to do… clean up the code a bit, package it up, and release it. I’ll try to do that soon. If you don’t see it in a week or so, bug me and I’ll bump it up on my to do list…

So when I came in on Tuesday and found it was not powered on, I pushed the power button. Nothing happened. I pushed it again. And Again. And 10 more times… and then plugged it into another socket, and tried a different power cord. And then got worried. I pulled out all the RAM, I crossed my fingers, tried again. Nothing… no fans, no whir, no beep… totally dead.

At this point, I pulled out my Eee PC and started doing some searches. I assumed it was the power supply, as absolutely nothing happened when the power button was pushed. I found the old G5 power supply replacement program, but the serial numbers did not match up. At this point I figured the only thing to do was to rip the thing apart, so I did.

Luckily, the Powermac G5 Take-Apart Guide was extremely useful. The model G5 did not match exactly, but it was enough to get me going. Let me tell you, getting the power supply out of a G5 is a bitch! I’ve worked on a lot of Macs, but getting the power supply out of this one was a nightmare involving two trips to the hardware store, and multiple “hold your breath” moments along the way.

In the end, I had the power supply out, and tested it for the trickle voltage and found nothing. So at this point I was reasonable sure it had to be the power supply. I called the Apple Store to ask about power supplies for a G5 and as always, they are useless for this sort of thing. I did some searching and found some on ebay for $150 or so, but needed one fast. We ended up finding one from AllMac for $199 and managed to do a little live chatting with them to confirm things, and I ordered the power supply before 3PM California time, and had it in Wisconsin the next day before noon.

By 2PM the next day I had the machine back in action. Less than 24 hours between my testing the power supply, finding it to be dead, getting a replacement ordered and shipped, and having it in place. Damn! 5 gold stars for AllMac on that one…

And while much of the world is running on Intel, the old dual-processor G5 Mac still does a decent job. (At least for now!)

You know how your computer seems really fast when you get it, and then after a while it seems like it’s not quite so fast? It’s because of all that crap you add along the way. Those widget, and music scrobbling clients, and Twitter clients, and calendar agents, and notifiers, and on and on…

Video editing is resource intensive, and what I’ve found is that if I’m going to do just editing, I will log out any other users on my Mac (damn you fast user switching!) and then reboot, and then launch Activity Monitor, and quit (or force quit if necessary) any process not directly related to my task. So with a fresh reboot, and no silly little processing doing silly little things, I can go about my work. Alternately, I suppose I could create an account dedicated just to editing, and boot into that, but that’s more of a pain to me…

The reboot and quitting of processes is probably a five minute process, but saves me well over five minutes of time within an hour of editing.

The 48 Hour Film Project is a wild and sleepless weekend in which you and a team make a movie—write, shoot, edit and score it—in just 48 hours. On Friday night, you get a character, a prop, a line of dialogue and a genre, all to include in your movie. 48 hours later, the movie must be complete. Then it will show at a local theater, usually in the next week.

It’s a neat idea, and a cool project that forces a burst of creativity in a short amount of time. While it is happening in Milwaukee the weekend of June 20th, 2008, I sadly, cannot take part… at least not for the entire weekend.

The main workstation is set up, as is the server, though we still have about two other machines to set up. And hey, there’s even a window, and it’s got blinds so I won’t be blinded. I may do some funky time-lapse stuff out the window, who knows?

All in all, I am totally digging the new set up so far. Organization, FTW!

Of course there is the dark underbelly… the “Behind the iMac” of this lovely little set up.

I think this is a major improvement over the old mess that I had (below) mainly because the power is now all hidden under the desk, and there’s not quite as much going on back there.

The challenge will be to keep things neat and tidy as we get into working like hell again. This office is bigger, and has a closet, so hopefully it will remain calm and collected.

You might remember that I got a DVI-D to HDMI cable back in January 2008. I tried to use it, but I just did not see a difference in signal quality, and there was this nasty lag when changing channels.

So when Gabe was over, I asked him about his experience with HDMI and he said he couldn’t stand the DRM wrapper it put on the video. I wasn’t sure what he was talking about until I mentioned the lag I was experiencing in changing channels, and he said “Dude, that’s the DRM wrapper I am talking about!” or something like that.

So I am back to using component video cables, because as Gabe pointed out, the ability to quickly go through the channels is of great importance. The component video cables allow that to happen, and like I said, I just am not seeing any difference in image quality. Maybe it’s me, maybe it’s my 3 1/2 year old HDTV, I dunno… but for now, we’ll do it this way.

Oh, the working title is “Balancing Act” by the way…

There has been a lot of planning and discussion this week, including assembling the FAB (or ‘Film Advisory Board’) which is a group of people I will bounce ideas off of, and creating some different sponsorship opportunities. So far a handful of people have offered to help, financially, and otherwise.

In the next week or two we’ll set up a web site, and start outlining things a bit more. We plan to keep things fairly transparent throughout production, so people can keep an eye on what is happening.

(Once the site is up, expect most of the updates to happen there, but I’ll still post things here on RasterWeb! when it makes the most sense.)

During 2008 I will be producing a documentary about how people find the balance between what they want to do, and what they need to do. It’s definitely a balancing act; a struggle between making your dreams come true, and having reality set in.

Through a series of interviews we’ll explore how people deal with the choices they’ve made and have to make, to do the work they find rewarding and satisfying.

Filming will commence in the Summer of 2008, with editing wrapping before the end of the year. We hope to premier the film by January 2009.

That bit above…. that’s the pitch. That’s the description of the documentary I’ll be working on this year. It’s sounds like a large project, and it is, and I’ve got about 8 months to do it.

I’ll be shooting on MiniDV with a Sony PD150. Much of the equipment will be on loan from Z2 Marketing + Design, who is a sponsor of this project. I still need other equipment and supplies, and that’s where you come in.

While I thought I could produce this film for no budget, that’s not exactly true. I think I can do it very cheaply though. I’ve had a few people tell me I should apply for a grant, and that’s a possibility (know any grant writers?) but I also plan to get people to sponsor me. I’ll follow up this post with one specifically outlining how I see it working.

This is exciting to me. I’ve been compiling a list of people to interview, and if you know someone you think of when reading the description above, let me know. (It would help if they were in the Milwaukee area, as the travel budget is non-existent right now.)

Anyway… watch this space for updates. Thanks….

My cat Tinkerbell has skin cancer. She is just a few months shy of being 5 years old. I adopted her after she was found wandering around a parking lot in 2003. She’s a good cat, and by that I mean that she is very loving, but like any cat, she can annoy the crap out of you…

Dana first noticed a lump on Tinkerbell’s side a while back, and I finally got around to calling a vet and asking about it. We took her in to have it removed, and after it was tested, they revealed that she had skin cancer. So right now, we need to watch her, and see if she develops any more lumps. They said she could within a few months, or years, and if it gets bad, we could get chemotherapy for her.

If money was no object, I’d consider it, but as it is, we can’t even afford to have the humans in the house see a doctor, so sadly, Tinkerbell is not going to be getting chemotherapy, and if she needs surgery in the future to remove another lump, that might not happen either. It’s a sad state of affairs, but it’s the reality we live in.

I’m hoping she pulls some “miracle cat” magic on us (nine lives and all that) and lives for many years with no more problems, but I’m not counting on it.

Just to add some fun into the mix, she managed to remove all her stitches on her own. We had the vet check it, and she didn’t manage to infect it. (That’s the “miracle cat” magic I’m talking about!) So now she has to wear the cone, which is always funny on TV, but it real life it’s just sort of sad.

When I was a kid, my family had a cat name Licorice, and that cat lived to be over 20 years old. I grew up with Licorice, and I honestly thought my kids would grow up with Tinkerbell, but like so much that is planned in life, things go awry and you just deal with it the best you can.